Zaha Hadid: Car Park and Terminus Strasbourg

The blurry interface of exurbia and suburbia represents strange and alien territory for architects, because the context is usually vague and the space haphazardly organized. Zaha Hadid’s work in Strasbourg capitalizes on the haphazardness of its suburban setting. To reconcile the car and the dense historic fabric of Strasbourg, Zaha Hadid responded to the site with elegant but deceptive simplicity. She folded a concrete canopy up from the ground to stretch diagonally across the bus and tram lanes toward the parking lot and Strasbourg beyond, as though pulled in that direction. The parking lots demonstrate Hadid’s assumption that buses and the trams are a permanently impermanent part of the station’s overall organization and composition Hadid treats the cars that park here almost as natural phenomena with their own diurnal rhythms. In 2003 Zaha Hadid von the Mies van der Rohe Preis for this project.

Zaha M. Hadid

Zaha Hadid, born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1950, began her study of architecture in 1972 at the Architectural Association in London and was awarded with the Diploma Prize in 1977. She then joined the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, began teaching at the Architectural Association and later led her own studio at the AA London until 1987. Her international breakthrough came with the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein. She was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize (2004) and has received many more awards for her work and is one of the most influental architects of our time.